A year after epic NCAA final, two stars cross paths in NBA D-League

A year ago, they were the heroes of March. Now, they're under the rader in the D-League.

By Chuck Culpepper, The Washington Post

March 16, 2017Updated: March 16, 2017 7:55am

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Marcus Paige, left, and Ryan Arcidiacono, who were at the center of Villanova’s thrilling victory over North Carolina in the national championship game last April, today are in the NBA Development League. less

Marcus Paige, left, and Ryan Arcidiacono, who were at the center of Villanova’s thrilling victory over North Carolina in the national championship game last April, today are in the NBA Development ... more

Marcus Paige and Ryan Arcidiacono, who were at the center of Villanova's thrilling victory over North Carolina in the national championship game last April, today are in the NBA Development League.

Marcus Paige and Ryan Arcidiacono, who were at the center of Villanova's thrilling victory over North Carolina in the national championship game last April, today are in the NBA Development League.

Photo: Brett Coomer, Staff

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North Carolina guard Marcus Paige (5) takes a game tying three with 4.7 seconds left during the NCAA National Championship at NRG Stadium Monday, April 4, 2016, in Houston. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle)

North Carolina guard Marcus Paige (5) takes a game tying three with 4.7 seconds left during the NCAA National Championship at NRG Stadium Monday, April 4, 2016, in Houston. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle)

Photo: Jon Shapley, STF

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North Carolina guard Marcus Paige (5) takes a game tying three point shot with 4.7 seconds left during the NCAA National Championship at NRG Stadium,Monday, April 4, 2016, in Houston. ( Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle ) less

North Carolina guard Marcus Paige (5) takes a game tying three point shot with 4.7 seconds left during the NCAA National Championship at NRG Stadium,Monday, April 4, 2016, in Houston. ( Brett Coomer / Houston ... more

Photo: Brett Coomer, Staff

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Marcus Paige's memorable tying 3-pointer became a historical footnote after Kris Jenkins' buzzer-beater won the national title for Villanova.

Marcus Paige's memorable tying 3-pointer became a historical footnote after Kris Jenkins' buzzer-beater won the national title for Villanova.

Photo: Jon Shapley, STF

A year after epic NCAA final, two stars cross paths in NBA D-League

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CEDAR PARK - Three hundred thirty-five days later, and back in Texas somehow, two young men had a mellow chat recently on a court in an arena that can seat 8,500 but wouldn't. An NBA Development League game set to start, Salt Lake City Stars vs. Austin Spurs, and an audience trickled in, eventually inching past "sparse" but coming up gapingly shy of "packed."

One young man, 22 going on 23, wore the No. 20 jersey of the Spurs, property of the NBA kingdom down the road in San Antonio. The other, 23, wore a black-and-gray T-shirt, inactive from Salt Lake City because of non-worrisome elbow tendinitis. As acquaintances since high school, they asked about each other. As college basketball buffs, they remarked on an odd plausibility: that Villanova and North Carolina could play the men's national championship game again.

They share that entanglement already. They're going to share it when they're double, triple and quadruple their ages. It had crisscrossed their minds every single day since last April 4 at NRG Stadium and, as Marcus Paige of Salt Lake City put it, "I imagine I'll think about it at least once a day for as long as I'm …" - pause - "for as long as I have a good healthy mind."

He laughed his good laugh after 335 days of emotions far more tangled, more meandering and more surprising than those of Villanova graduate Ryan Arcidiacono, with whom Paige chatted, 11 months and a day after they played as opposing guards three hours to the southeast in the Villanova-North Carolina national treasure.

March, the maddest, damnedest month on the American sports calendar, has come back. It last left us amid April, as it does, when Villanova led North Carolina in the 2016 national title game by 10 points with five minutes left, and then Paige hit a 3-point shot to tie it at 74 with 4.7 seconds left. Then Villanova drew up a beauty of a response, Arcidiacono hurried down the court and passed to a trailing Kris Jenkins, whose 3-pointer flew while the buzzer and the red lights went off, plunging into the basket in one of the most enthralling bloody things basketball nuts ever saw.

Those nuts will see it again and again and again into YouTube eternity, of course, as the connectedness of the world already has demanded from Paige than it ever could for, say, Kentuckians after Christian Laettner's famous shot for Duke in 1992.

"So, like, I follow (Jenkins) on Twitter," Paige said. "I follow Ryan on Twitter because I've known Ryan since high school (in Iowa for Paige, Pennsylvania for Arcidiacono). I follow (former Villanova player) Daniel Ochefu on Twitter. So, my timeline, they'll just pop up. They'll retweet something, or they'll throw a 'Throwback Thursday' up, and it's them winning a national title. I'm like, 'Ah.' I could unfollow them, but that's petty."

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And now, to the breezier side: Recently, Arcidiacono walked through what he called "a random mall in Texas," and: "I had Villanova shorts on, and some kid was promoting some health app, and he was like, 'Oh, you're a Villanova fan,' and I was like, 'Yeah, like, kind of.' He was like, 'That championship game killed me. I was at UNC. I grew up in Chapel Hill.' As I'm walking away, I was like, 'Oh, well, I passed the ball.' And he was like, 'You're that Arcidiacono kid!'"

A different experience

While the past refuses to stop shouting, the senior Jenkins this year averages 13 points and four rebounds for No. 2-ranked Villanova, while two former four-year college point guards mine the "D-League," which Paige deems one of the five best leagues in the world, below the NBA and probably the leagues in Spain, Germany and China. He calls it "a great tool," and "a great place to kind of lose yourself and get out from the huge public eye of Carolina basketball and just work on bettering myself." Arcidiacono calls it "a good and humbling experience in a sense" and notes how "the players you play against are always going to be very, very good." He seeks to master the accelerated pace. Paige looks around a league of NBA aspirants and sees abundant "hunger."

They've disembarked from the charter planes of big-college life into a world a notch realer. Wake-up calls for flights come sometimes at 4 a.m. They ride in vans sometimes. They fly and play on the same dates sometimes. They have road roommates. They turn up everywhere from Grand Rapids to Sioux Falls. Per diems aren't flush and demand budgeting. Hotels are good but sub-five-stars, and before the Stars/Spurs game, some bone-tired Stars lounged around the lobby waiting for their rooms to get ready.

"I went from being one of the main guys every time you turn on ESPN and Carolina," Paige said, "… and now it's just like 200 people are watching my game on Facebook live stream. You kind of disappear a little bit. It's been interesting."

Can't escape it

Then they reappear somewhere and invariably, people approach them about 77-74 - at pregame shootarounds, in malls, in airports. For Arcidiacono, that's all pretty straightforward, with observations like, "There's nothing negative about it," and, "Occasionally, you'll just think back: 'Did that really happen?'" he said.

For Paige, there have been more curves.

"At first I was like, 'Man, I'm not going to want to talk about this, this particular incident, over and over again,' " he said.

Then he noticed something unexpected: It started making him recollect what actually was the funnest week of his young life. Along the way, he had labyrinthine moments. For a good while, people often wanted to talk about his shot, so that it was as if his own heroics might contribute to his eternal patch of misery. He couldn't bear to watch Villanova feted with President Obama in May, then heard that, whoa, Obama had said Paige's name in the process, after Paige sometimes had wondered if Obama knew who he was.

Finally, one day last August after the NBA Summer League, he found himself the only human in his family's home in Iowa, in the basement where his father, Ellis, had birthed a veritable museum to Paige and his sister, Morgan, who played basketball at Wisconsin. Studying his father's intricately catalogued game DVDs, Marcus came upon the big one.

"And he had the copy of the Villanova game and I was like, 'You know what? … I just popped it in, sat back on the couch and just clicked 'play' and let it go from start to finish." Vince, the family Schnauzer named for Tar Heel luminary Vince Carter, watched nearby.

"And it was cool," Paige said, "because obviously I was in the moment, so I didn't get to appreciate it, but the intros were super-cool, the game was cool. Obviously at the end, I got a little excited and stuff and kind of felt like we might actually win, but it was cool to just watch the copy and just kind of appreciate what I was a part of."

He saw a play he had heard about but couldn't recall, his missed layup and put-back amid an imposing crowd with 23 seconds left, and he said, "During the game, it happened so fast that it didn't seem out of the ordinary or anything, but I was pretty impressed with myself!" (Big laugh.)

At moments he has wondered if losing by 10 points might have wrought less sting, but he came to value that sting. "The players decided the game, and it wasn't just with free throws, and with fouling," he said. "It was shot-making. It was high-level adjustments … It was just a fantastic game, so I wouldn't ever want (the loss) to be any different than it was … From a pure basketball standpoint, that's how you want it to go."

Meanwhile, of course, Arcidiacono has never watched 77-74 alone. He has watched always in accompanied merriment, as with his parents, Joe, a former Villanova football lineman, and Patti. They have epitomized the staggering divergences that stem from minuscule margins in sports.

"It just brings pure happiness to my whole family," he said. "My parents are just so excited about it. It's an unbelievable feeling."

On the morning of April 5, around 11 a.m., these two poles of emotion had Twitter-messaged one another. Paige had just finished sitting all night in a hotel room with six teammates - Brice Johnson, Nate Britt, Kennedy Meeks, Theo Pinson, Joel Berry and Justin Jackson - as a prevailing quiet slowly gave way toward laughter at stories like the one when Pinson went to the Sweet 16 interview dais even though no one had requested him. At 4-ish, they had gone for food, gotten an Uber, found a fast food restaurant, found it closed, scrambled back to the Uber.

"There was so much mental and physical exhaustion and struggle that happened," Paige said, "that it's like then you can't be sad anymore. It's like your body won't let you."

Arcidiacono messaged first: "Sorry that one team had to lose," but congratulating Paige on his career. Paige replied: "It was a battle and you guys earned it. Nothing but love." And: "Just tell Kris I'm never talking to him again."

They would see each other nine months later when their D-League teams met in Utah, and Paige would ask Arcidiacono about his experience at Spurs camp. They would exchange tweets during the Super Bowl, when Paige saw the Atlanta Falcons' horror show and suggested NRG Stadium must be haunted, whereupon Arcidiacono tweeted a crying emoji.

Then on the first Sunday in another March, Arcidiacono played 17 minutes and Paige none, but Paige joined the handshake line after Salt Lake City's 119-113 win over Austin, and two young men hugged quickly but sincerely, veterans of a game that became so loudly untied, yet ties them for good.